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The Louis
D. Brown Peace Institute assists and empowers families impacted by violence by
providing support to survivors of homicide. Applying their peace curriculum in
area schools, the Peace Institute works to instill the value of peace in young
people. Through education, collaboration, and policy advocacy, the Peace
Institute works to raise awareness of the cause and consequences of violence on
the individual, the family, and the community. To learn more visit 
Louis D. Brown Peace Institute
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Sunday, May 11, 2014
***Holden Caulfield Is Me And You- J.D. Salinger’s Catcher In The
Rye
Rye
Book Review
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Catcher In The Rye, J. D. Salinger, Little Brown and Company, New York, 1945, 1991
Yeah, I know, you and I were the only ones who ever suffered the horrors of growing up absurd in America-name your generation. The only ones who suffered the pangs of teen angst and alienation like it didn’t come with the territory of being a teenager ever since they invented the category back a hundred plus years ago. Like every kid didn’t balk at the prospects in front of him or her in facing a society that they did not create, and had no say in creating. Personally for a long time I believed that my generation, the generation of ’68, the ones who made a lot of noise for a time about turning the world upside down and who today they make nostalgia films about, was the only generation that faced the grinding. And then we in our turn read the book under review, J. D. Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye and knew we were not alone, that yes, this angst and alienation thing had been around for a while.
Some of us from my time for a time made Holden Caulfield our literary hero, the kid who “spoke” to us in our coming of age time (until we, having come of age in the early 1960s, “discovered” Sal and Dean in Jack Kerouac’s On The Road). While there were many elements of Holden’s personality that might not ring true for any individual collectively his plight resonated. Problems of sexual identity, of intellectual identity, of class, of falseness and perversity, of the clash of household generations, of fighting against a system stacked up against the young, of personal depression, they are all there. As well as some less savory traits, a certain elitism, a certain distain of the masses, and of women, well girls really, and lots of mannerisms like having a negative on almost everything that one would hope he will grow out of.
The story line here is fairly simple- a couple of tough winter days in the life of a well-off New York teenager whose problem at the moment was to hide the fact, postpone really, that once again he had been kicked out of a school for, ah, “not applying himself (sound familiar). The momentary solution to that situation which sounded reasonable to anybody who actually had been a troubled teenager was to say the hell with it and do a junior version of wine, women and song. Except, at least on the surface our man Holden takes no pleasure in that-carping against everything not nailed down, fellow classmates, teachers, past and present, cab drivers, elevator operators, whores, dicey girlfriends. Everything. By the end it is an open book whether he will be a CEO of a major corporation or windup on skid row. While some of the stream-of-consciousness devise used by Salinger to make his point about the modern teen condition this is a great American literary work of art from one of the best of the “non-beat” New York writers hanging around in the post- World War II period. Read the book, read the book more than once like I did.
Saturday, May 10, 2014
In Honor Of May Day 2014-From The American Left History Blog Archives-All Out On May Day 2012: A Day Of International Working Class
Solidarity Actions- An Open Letter To The Working People Of Boston From A
Fellow Worker
All Out For May
1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Why Working People Need To Show Their Power On May Day 2012
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. I will stop there although I could go on and on. Sounds familiar though, sounds like your situation or that of someone you know, right?
Words, or words like them, are taken daily from today’s global headlines. But these were also similar to the conditions our forebears faced in America back in the 1880s when this same vicious ruling class was called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind, Jay Gould, stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight connected with the heroic Haymarket Martyrs in 1886 for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the robber barons of the 21st century.
No question over the past several years (really decades but now it is just more public and right in our face) American working people have taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Start off with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back except as “race to the bottom” low wage, two-tier jobs dividing younger workers from older workers like at General Electric or the auto plants). Move on to paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “too big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, in some cases literally paying nothing, we pay). And finish up with mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a life-time deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and many women and the grievances voiced long ago in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or, for some of us, great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like hell, against the ruling class that seems to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the ruling class of that day by their front-man Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property.
The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out via the Occupy movement), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under. All Out On May Day 2012.
I have listed some of the problems we face now to some of our demand that should be raised every day, not just May Day. See if you agree and if you do take to the streets on May Day with us. We demand:
Why Working People Need To Show Their Power On May Day 2012
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. I will stop there although I could go on and on. Sounds familiar though, sounds like your situation or that of someone you know, right?
Words, or words like them, are taken daily from today’s global headlines. But these were also similar to the conditions our forebears faced in America back in the 1880s when this same vicious ruling class was called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind, Jay Gould, stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight connected with the heroic Haymarket Martyrs in 1886 for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the robber barons of the 21st century.
No question over the past several years (really decades but now it is just more public and right in our face) American working people have taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Start off with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back except as “race to the bottom” low wage, two-tier jobs dividing younger workers from older workers like at General Electric or the auto plants). Move on to paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “too big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, in some cases literally paying nothing, we pay). And finish up with mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a life-time deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and many women and the grievances voiced long ago in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or, for some of us, great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like hell, against the ruling class that seems to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the ruling class of that day by their front-man Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property.
The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out via the Occupy movement), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under. All Out On May Day 2012.
I have listed some of the problems we face now to some of our demand that should be raised every day, not just May Day. See if you agree and if you do take to the streets on May Day with us. We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker
Unions! No More Wisconsins! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work!
Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure
(bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
*End the endless wars- Troops
And Mercenaries Out Of Afghanistan (and Iraq)!-U.S Hands Off Iran! Hands Off
The World!
* Full citizenship rights for
all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the
minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
* A moratorium on home
foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student
loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many
publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public
transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! For free quality
public transportation!
To order to flex our
collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging
series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within
our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there is no union - a
one-day strike around some, or all, of the above-mentioned demands.
*We will be organizing at
workplaces where a strike is not possible for workers to call in sick, or take
a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out”.
*We will be organizing
students from kindergarten to graduate school and the off-hand left-wing think
tank to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up
campus picket lines, and to rally at a central location.
*We will be calling in our
communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where
possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
All out on May Day 2012.
************
Rain beating down, rain-beaten, as downcast as the
weather a sock-soaked, rain jacket-soaked, pants-soaked Frank Jackman
around 10:00 AM gathered up the small
remnant of materials at hand. Those that he had actually decided to carry from
the underground parking facility a few blocks from where he stood just then at
the corner of Franklin and Congress Streets in downtown Boston when he realized
that the thousand or so protestors were not going to materialize that day. The
reason that Frank had been in the downtown area, not one of his usual haunts,
was to participant in the May Day 2012 protest actions at the State Street
Bank. Frank had been helping to organize the actions all spring ever since a
call came out from Occupy Wall Street
in January to build for a General Strike on May Day. Although Frank, and some
of the other organizers, had not been naïve enough to believe that they could
bring off a General Strike in Boston that year he, and they, believed that a
serious mass action closing down one big symbol of Wall Street’s and the
financial markets catastrophic effect on the American and world economy could
be planned and be successful as a first effort. And gather important media
coverage as well.
So the May Day organizing committee made up of mainly
younger radicals and student supporters with a sprinkling of old-timers like
Frank had planned, had planned not in the old-fashioned way by counting heads
but by responses to a social networking campaign.
As May Day approached the committee, Frank included,
began to think that upwards of one thousand people might show up at the bank
and that they could effectively close it down for several hours, with or with
arrests, but with good media coverage. The reason for that wide-spread belief
was that the Facebook event page that
they had created had posted several thousand “likes” and “will comes.” Moreover
many committee members were being deluged with requests for information and for
flyers (although Frank as active as anybody on the networking sites did not see
a “spike”). In any case Frank, who had volunteered to show up at the meeting
point early and bring all the necessary materials for the action in his car was
also carried away by the prospects of a successful action.
In the event Frank did not even bring a quarter of the
material that he had transported in his car from Cambridge and most of that as
he now realized had not needed to be
transported either. That many thousand “likes” turned out to be about fifty
bedraggled protestors who to avoid freezing in the rain walked around shouting slogans
to crowd-less streets. Crowd-less and media-less since the several well-known
media vans that had gathered expecting to see a reportable melee had left by 8:00
AM looking for as one reporter snidely remarked on camera “real news”. Sure
Frank was disappointed, sure he was crest-fallen, sure his was a little angry that
some of the younger committee members thought that the vague social-networking
streams that they lived and died by would come through like this was Cairo or
someplace like that. But mainly he realized the very severe limits of cyberspace
organizing when the deal went down. He hoped, as he wiped some raindrops off
his face, that not a few of those “likes” were at least out of bed by then.
Short Phillip Marlowe Sketch
The Assistant Murderer
Tough hard guys, and once in a while
a wayward gal, have been trying to commit the perfect murder since they
invented murder with Cain slaying Abel, and maybe before. And some guys, some
hard guys, have actually gotten away with it for one reason or another mainly
by disposing of the body in some way so the damn thing is never found and the
cops tire of the case and throw it in the cold files to lie there forever. But
the average citizen, and I should know since it is my business, the private
snoop business, to know trying to commit the perfect crime leaves too many
moving parts and so winds up facing the hangman, facing those high-hung gallows
and judgment day. The only way it happens, and don’t take this as the norm,
okay is if the thing is set up that way. Here’s what I mean. The organization I
work for, the International Operations Organization got a call from a loner
private eye, Philip Marlowe, down in Los Angeles saying he needed some help on
a political case, political in that some reform politician he had known in the
old days was murdered and it looked like a professional hit ordered by the in
power city machine. I was sent down from
my station in Frisco since I had worked with him previously on a missing load
of rare jade case that had turned south on him. As it turned out this reformer
was nothing but a skirt-chaser and he ever-loving wife, tired of his sordid
affairs put a couple of slugs in him to even things up. Nothing unusual in that,
happen all the time. What was unusual and put it in the perfect crime category
is that before this guy died he set the crime scene up to point away from
wifey. And she walked, walked when Philip and I let her walk away without a
murmur.
But that is not the normal case,
take the case of the Lampreys, Jim and Adele, and John Snyder. Seems that this Snyder saved the Lampreys’
lives down in Mexico around the time of the revolution, you know Pancho Villa,
Zapata and those guys. They were being held for ransom by some desperados and
he coolly put together an attack that sprung them. That was their story anyway.
So they were forever indebted to him and in return helped him on some shady
capers back in the old U.S.A. One thing led to another and there was a falling
out of what was supposed to have done what and who was supposed to get the
bigger cut of the dough that went sour. So John Snyder wound up dead, very
dead, in some forsaken ravine down around Del Mar near the cliffs. The
insurance company that had insured Snyder called us in when they were getting
ready to pay out on a big number policy to one Adele Snyder. It didn’t take
much to turn that one over since Adele had actually been married to Snyder down
in Mexico, had abandoned him for Lamprey and headed north. That was how Snyder
got them to do his work in the states not some desperado tale down in
Sonora. He was going to squawk to the coppers about bigamy after that failed
caper and the pair beat him to it one rainy night. The insurance money lured
them out and once I got my mitts on them they break like a cheap piece of
china. So learn something will you let the murder racket to the professionals
and stay away from such doings.
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